Fall of the Spirits of Darkness

Schmidt Number: S-3409

On-line since: 15th January, 2008

LECTURE 8

Abstraction and Reality

Dornach, 13 October 1917

You will have
gathered, from what I said yesterday, that at the present
time we must come to realize the distinction between abstract
and purely intellectual thinking, and thinking which is based
on reality, in order to relate our thinking to the reality.
The natural tendency is to make our thinking
incontrovertible, as free from contradictions as we can make
it. But the world is full of contradictions, and if we really
want to grasp reality, we cannot throw a general, standard
form of thinking like a net over everything in order to
understand it. We have to consider everything on an
individual basis.

The greatest
defect and deficiency in our time is that people are
literally inclined to think in abstractions. This takes them
further away from reality.

We now come to
the application of this to reality itself. Please, consider
this carefully! I am going to say something rather strange,
for I have to apply unrealistic thinking to reality.
Unrealistic thinking is, of course, also part of reality. The
unrealistic thinking which has developed over the last three
or four centuries, and the fact that as such it has become
part of reality in human life, has resulted in an unreal
structure which is always self-contradictory. People are
doing alright, one might say, with regard to the physical and
material world, for the physical world ignores them, and they
can therefore have as many wrong ideas as they like. This
makes them — forgive the paradoxical way of putting
this — into billy-goats who keep butting against the
brick wall of reality with their horns in their insistence on
thinking about the physical world in abstract terms. We can
see this with many ideologies; they keep coming up against
the brick wall of reality. And they are sometimes just as
stubborn as goats, these ideologies.

The situation
is different, however, when it comes to social and political
life. Here the human thoughts of every individual enter into
the social structure. We do not come up against a reality
that will not yield; in this case we create the reality. And
if this goes on for a few hundred years the reality will be
what you may expect it to be; it will be full of
contradictions. Reality itself comes to realization in
structures which do not have the power of reality in them; as
a result there are upheavals such as the present catastrophic
war.

Here you have
the connection between the inner life of people who lived in
a particular age and the outer physical events of a time
which comes a little later. It is always the situation that
anything which emerges in the physical world has first lived
in the spirit, and this also applies where humanity is
concerned, with things living first in human thoughts and
then in human actions. And we can see how abstract thinking
has penetrated into reality if we look at the present time
where this shows itself in its true form — that is, in
this case in its untrue form, which is its true form. The
reality is in many ways seen in an abstract way. People look
at it as if they were watching the conjuror I spoke of
yesterday and the weights which have no weight, with the
conjuror behaving as if they weighed many kilograms.

The most
significant characteristic of many of the concepts held today
is their poverty. People like to take things easy today
— as I have said so many times — and they want
their concepts to be as straightforward as possible. This,
however, makes them rather limited. Now, limited concepts do
prove adequate when one is dealing with the superficial
aspects of the physical world, the mere surface of that
world, which is the only thing modern people want to
consider, in spite of all the advances. Magnificent
discoveries have been made in recent times about physical
phenomena, but the concepts used to explore them are
relatively limited. The desire for limited concepts, or
concepts of limited content, has also crept into all
philosophical and ideological thinking. We see philosophers
today who are literally craving such limited concepts. The
most limited concepts, with practically no content, are
tossed about over and over again. They are often quite
pretentious, but they do not contain anything which has real
weight. Widely used ideas today are ‘the
eternal’, ‘infinity’, ‘unity’,
the ‘significant’ compared to the
‘insignificant’, ‘general’,
‘particular’, and so on. People like bandying
these about — the more abstract the better.

This creates a
peculiar situation with regard to reality. People no longer
see the living reality in anything and lose all feeling for
what reality really has to offer. Merely observe the present
situation and you will find this everywhere.

Let me tell
you about something that is really worrying. A present-day
philosopher
[ Note 1 ]
has been considering the question as to whether it is possible
to have an opinion regarding the length of time for which this
war will continue. It is a vital question, I think you will
agree, but it is a question which needs to be decided by
using real concepts which have content and are full of life;
it cannot be decided by using generalized abstract ideas of
world and temporality, general and particular, and so on.
This kind of generalized philosophizing will get us nowhere
with regard to the concrete issues. The philosopher concerned
found, as many people find, that it does not matter if the
war continues for any length of time, for this will the only
way of achieving ‘permanent peace’, as they call
it, and let us have paradise on earth. You will remember, I
compared this with the idea that the best way of making sure
no more crockery is broken in the home is to break all the
crockery in the first place. This is more or less the
conclusion reached by people who say the war must continue
until there is a prospect of permanent peace.

The
philosopher therefore applied his ideology to the question,
an ideology which in his opinion deals with the most sublime
— which in our time means the most abstract —
ideas. And what did he say? Believe it or not, he said:
‘Compared to the eternity it takes to create
satisfactory conditions for humanity, what does it matter if
a few more tons of organic matter perish in the Fields of
battle! What are a few tons of organic matter compared to
life eternal, to human evolution!’

Those are the
achievements of abstract thinking when it is addressing
itself to reality. And we have to draw people's attention to
how horrific this is, for they do not feel it on their own.
We can only be in constant amazement at how these things
escape attention and fail to give much cause for thought.
Fundamentally speaking, such ideas are part of the
present-day desire for ideologies. This has given rise to the
most abstract of abstract ideas which, however, can only be
applied to the dead, inorganic mineral world. If philosophers
apply such ideas not only to the sphere of life, but also to
that of the soul and spirit, it is only to be expected that
they come to this kind of conclusion. In the realm of dead
matter, human beings do, of course, have to apply the
principle: ‘What are so and so many hundredweight of
material compared to what will be the end result?’ It
would be impossible to do any building, for instance, if we
were obliged to leave everything untouched. Yet we must not
apply to human life what applies only in the lifeless,
inorganic world. The concepts developed in modern science
apply only to the inorganic world, but people are all the
time applying them elsewhere, and the problem is that no one
notices. Opinions of the kind that the war should not be
brought to an end until the above-mentioned prospect is
there, are saying exactly what the philosopher put so
brutally, although it would seem to him that he put it in a
very superior way. Others simply feel embarrassed about
saying such things, but the philosopher hides the brutality
behind beautiful words. Yes, he puts things in a very
superior way, juggling with ideas like eternity and
temporality, the human being forever evolving, the transient,
temporal reality of so and so many tons of organic matter;
but he ignores the fact that eternity, infinity, lives in
every human being, and that every single human being is worth
as much as the whole inorganic world taken together!

These things
also provide the background to the forms we are now seeking
to develop here on this hill. For art, too, has gradually
been caught up in an ideology which is without weight and
without reality. We have to come to the true nature of things
again, and this is only possible if we come to the spirit. We
therefore need different forms from those one generally sees
in the world of art today. In other words, our age must once
again become creative and do so out of the spirit. This goes
against the grain with many people today. But try and
understand the enormous extent to which our whole ideology
has gradually entered more and more into the lifeless sphere,
because it has only been considering that sphere. Look at the
buildings and at the other works of art produced in the
nineteenth century. Really, all one gets is old styles
rehashed over and over again. People have built in the
classical style, the Renaissance and the Gothic styles
— always something which is no longer alive. They have
not been able to work with the elements which live in the
present. This is what we must achieve; it will create a
completely new spirit. It will involve many sacrifices. But
something like the house which has been built outside,
[ Note 2 ]
which has new
forms created out of the concrete itself, is a pioneering
effort. And it matters not only that these forms have been
thought, but also that the opportunity was made to produce
such a building. These things must be considered and given
their full weight, otherwise there can be no comprehension of
what we intend to create on this hill. The nature of the
whole is such that the forms now coming into existence here
contradict and are in utter conflict with the forms created
in the rest of the world today.

‘To
understand the present time’ — this phrase has
been like a thread running through everything I have been
saying to you since my return. It does, however, mean that
rather than take it easy, we have to put in a lot of effort
— effort of thought, effort of feeling, effort of will
to experiment, in the desire to understand the present time.
And we must have the courage to make a complete break with
some of the things that belong to the past. Fundamentally
speaking, the people who are considered to be most
enlightened today are often working with old ideas, without
really knowing how to use them to good purpose.

Let me give
you an example. I am sure that here in Switzerland, too, you
will have heard and read a lot about a book which was no
doubt also given pride of place in local bookshop windows,
for it has made a profound impression in the present time. I
am especially pleased to be able to speak of something that
comes from our friends and not only our enemies, so that no
one should think there is a personal bias. The book, on the
State as a life form, was written by the Scandinavian writer
Rudolf Kjellen,
[ Note 3 ]
one of the few who have shown an interest in my writings and
commented on them in a positive way. So I think it will be
obvious that there is no personal bias in what I am going to
say about this book, but I believe it is something which has
to be said.

The book is a
good example of the inappropriate ideas people have in the
present time. An attempt is made to see the State as an
organism. This is the kind of thing people do when they use
the ideas current in our time to grasp anything that needs to
be grasped in mind and spirit. It is good to be able to say
this is an erudite, scholarly and truly profound individual,
someone we really cannot praise enough, but at the same time
we are going to show the true nature of the completely
inappropriate idea on which the book is based. This is the
kind of contradiction in which we find ourselves all the
time. Life is full of contradictions. Abstract and
incontrovertible ideas will not do if we want to take hold of
life. We should not immediately think that someone whom we
have to fight is an idiot; it is also possible to see someone
whom we have to fight as a most erudite and thoroughgoing
scholar, as indeed is the case with the author about whose
work I am speaking.

What Kjellen
is doing is rather similar to what the Swabian — now I
do not know what to call him, the Swabian scholar or the
Austrian Minister of State, for he was both — Schaeffle.
[ Note 4 ]
Schaeffle in
his day made a thorough attempt to see the State as an
organism and individual citizens as the cells in this
organism. Hermann Bahr — I have spoken of him before
[ Note 5 ]
— wrote a refutation of Schaeffle's book. The title of
the book was:
Die Aussichtslosigkeit der Sozialdemokratie
(translates as ‘Social democracy — Outlook nil’);
the refutation was entitled:
Die Einsichtslosigkeit des Herrn Schaeffle
(translates as ‘Mr. Schaeffle — Insight nil’),
a brilliant little book. He called it a
bit of naughtiness in a recent lecture. It is still quite a
brilliant piece of work, written in his youth.

Schaeffle,
therefore, did something rather like Kjellen is doing now.
Kjellen, too, is trying to present every State as an
organism, with the individual citizens as its cells. We do,
of course, know quite a few things about the way in which
cells function in an organism, and about the laws which
pertain in an organism, and this transfers quite prettily to
a State. People like to use such comparisons in areas which
their minds are unable to penetrate. Well, the method of
comparison can be applied to anything. If you like, I can
easily develop a complete little science based on the
comparison between a swarm of locusts and a double bass. You
can compare anything to anything in the world, and
comparisons will always prove fruitful. But the fact that we
are able to make comparisons certainly does not mean that we
are dealing with reality in making them. It is especially
important to have a tremendous sense of reality when creating
analogies, otherwise they will not work. When we create an
analogy we are apt to find ourselves in the situation which
some people experience as a harsh destiny in the days of
their youth, when — forgive me — we instantly
fall in love with the analogy we have created. Analogies
which come to mind and really are obvious do have the
drawback that we fall in love with them. This has its
consequence, however, for we grow blind to any argument
against the conclusions which may be drawn from the
analogy.

And I must
say, when I had read Kjellen's book, I realized, as soon as I
considered it in the light of reality, that it has been
written right now, during this war. To write such a book
about the State as an organism did seem entirely unrealistic
to me. You only need to look around you a little and you
realize — even if it may not be literally so —
that wars are fought in such a way that bits are cut off from
the States which are in combat, and one bit is put here and
another there; bits are cut off and put somewhere else. This
aspect of war does matter, at least to a lot of people.

Now, if we
were to compare States to organisms, we should at least try
and take the analogy so far that one would also be able to
cut bits off one organism and give them to a neighbouring
organism. This is something people should realize, but they
do not, because they have fallen in love with the analogy.
There are many other examples I could give, and these would
probably amuse you a great deal and make you laugh heartily,
and you would then no longer consider the individual
concerned to be as erudite as I do consider him to be. I do
indeed consider him to be most erudite and truly
profound.

How can it
happen that someone may be erudite and a real scholar and
nevertheless build a whole system on a completely
inappropriate idea? Well, you see, the reason is that the
analogy created by Kjellen is correct. You will now say that
you no longer know which way to turn; first I tell you the
analogy is utterly inappropriate and then I tell you it is
correct. Well, in saying that it is correct I meant that it
can certainly be made; what matters, however, is what we are
comparing. You always have two things in an analogy, in
Kjellen's case the State and the organism. Things must always
be presented in accord with their true nature. The State
exists, and the organism, too, exists. Neither of them can be
wrong — only the way they are brought together is
wrong. The point is that what is happening on earth can
certainly be compared to an organism. The political events on
earth can be compared to an organism; but we must not compare
the State to an organism. If we compare the State to an
organism, this makes individual human beings into cells,
which is simply nonsense, for it will get us nowhere. It is,
however, possible to compare political and social life on
earth to an organism, but it is the whole earth which must be
compared to the organism. As soon as we compare the whole
earth, that is human events all over the earth, to an
organism, and the different States — not the people
— to different kinds of cells, the analogy is true and
it is valid.

If you take
this as your basis and then observe how individual States
relate to each other, you will have something similar to the
cells which make up the different systems in the organism.
What matters, therefore, is that we apply any analogy we have
chosen to create at the right level. Kjellen's — and
also Schaeffle's — mistake was to compare an individual
State to the whole organism, when in fact it can only be
compared to a cell, a fully developed cell. Life on the earth
as a whole can be compared to an organism, and then the
comparison will prove fruitful. I think you will agree that
the cells of the organism do not walk past each other in the
way individual people do in a country. Cells adjoin, they are
neighbours, and this also holds true for individual States,
which are indeed like cells in the total organism of life on
earth.

You may well
feel that something is missing in what I have been saying. If
your sense for pedantic accuracy — and this, too, has
its justification — begins to stir in your hearts as I
say these things, you will no doubt say I ought to give you
proof that the life of the whole earth must be compared to
the organism and an individual State to a cell. Well, the
proof of the pudding lies in the eating; it does not lie in
the abstract deliberations which we can always go into, but
in taking the thought to its conclusion. If you do so with
regard to Kjellen's idea, you will always find that it cannot
be taken to its conclusion. You will keep running into a
brick wall, and you will have to turn into a goat; otherwise
you cannot take it to its conclusion. Yet if you take the
thought to its conclusion for the life of the whole earth,
you will find that it works, that you gain useful insights
and it makes a good regulative principle. You will come to
understand many things, even more than I have already
indicated.

People are
abstractionists today, and one feels like saying that if you
have a dozen people, thirteen of them would think as follows
— I know the figures do not fit, but the real situation
is such today that it is practically true. If you take the
case where Kjellen compares the individual State to an
organism — and if we are countering this by saying that
in reality one must compare political and social life all
over the globe to an organism — these thirteen people
out of a dozen will believe the analogy to be valid for all
times. For if someone establishes a theory about the State,
then this theory must apply in the present time, in Roman
times, and even in Egyptian and Babylonian times; for a State
is a State. People base themselves on concepts today, not on
the reality.

But truly this
is not how things are. In this respect, too, humanity is
going through a process of evolution. The analogy I have
given is only valid from the sixteenth century onwards;
before then the globe was not a coherent whole; it has only
come to be a coherent political whole from then onwards.
America, the western hemisphere, simply did not exist for any
political life which might have been a coherent whole. By
creating a proper analogy, you immediately also see the
tremendous break that exists between more recent life and
life in the past. Insights based on reality always bear
fruit, compared to concepts not based on reality, which are
sterile and do not bear fruit. Every insight based on reality
takes us a step further. We gain more than its immediate
content and it takes us forward in the real world. This is
what is so important; it is what we must concentrate on.
Abstract concepts are like this: we have them, but the
reality is outside and does not care a hoot about this
abstract concept. Concepts based on reality hold within them
the whole active inner life which is also there outside, life
that chumbles and churns
[ Note 6 ]
in every part of the real world out there. People are made
uncomfortable by this. They want their concepts to be as
quiet and colourless as possible and are afraid they will get
giddy if their concepts have inner life.

Concepts
without inner life do, however, have the disadvantage that
the reality can be there in front of our eyes and yet we do
not see the most important element in it. Reality is also
full of concepts and ideas. It is really true what I said
here a few days ago: elemental life goes on out there, and it
is full of concepts and ideas. I also said that abstract
ideas are mere corpses of ideas. It can happen that people
who only like corpses of ideas will speak and think in them,
whereas reality comes to quite different conclusions; it lets
events take quite a different course from anything human
minds are liable to come up with.

For three
years now we have been caught up in terrible events which can
teach us a great deal; we must be awake in following events,
however, and not asleep. It is really something to marvel at,
negatively speaking, that so many people are still asleep to
the reality of these terrible events and still have not come
to the realization that events which have never happened
before in the world evolution of humanity demand that we
develop new ideas, which also have not existed before. Let me
put this more accurately in symbolic form. We may certainly
say that some individuals had a notion that this war was
coming and they may have had it for many years. Generally
speaking, it can be said, however, that with the exception of
certain groups in the Anglo-American world, the war was
completely unexpected. With those who had an idea of its
coming, the idea sometimes took a very odd form. One idea,
which could be found again and again, came from economists
and politicians who were deep thinkers — I assure you,
I am not being ironical, I am completely serious about this
— and was based on careful deductions made with
reference to certain events. These people proceeded in a very
scientific way, combining, abstracting and making all kinds
of syntheses, and finally arrived at an idea which one really
did come across for a long time, even at the time when war
broke out. It was that in the light of the present world
situation, of economic factors and the trade situation, this
war could not possibly go on for more than four or six
months. This was a truth fully supported by factual evidence.
And the reasons given were far from stupid; they were
perfectly good reasons.

But how does
reality compare to the whole tissue of reasons put together
by those clever economists? Well, you can see what is
happening in reality! What is the point, ask you, when such a
situation arises? The point is that we must draw the right
conclusions from such a situation, so that the war actually
teaches us something. What is the only possible conclusion
from what I have given as a symbol? You see, I have merely
given one glaringly obvious instance; I could tell you of
many other and similar views which have also fallen foul
— to put it mildly — of the real events which
have occurred in the last three years. What, then, is the
only real conclusion? It is that everything from which the
wrong conclusions were drawn must be thrown overboard and we
must say to ourselves: Our thinking has been divorced from
reality; we have developed a system of ideas and then applied
this abstract, unrealistic system to reality, which made
reality become untrue. We must therefore break with the
premises on which our apparent conclusion was based, for this
conclusion destroys the real world!

One can make a
strong point of saying these things to people today, but
whether they will also take it as a strong point is another
question. Something that was just as intelligent as the
politicians' idea of the potential duration of the war
— again I am not being ironical — were the
reasons given by an enlightened group of medical men when the
first railways were being built in Central Europe. Speaking
on the basis of medical knowledge at the time, not just a
single eccentric but a whole group of medical men — I
have spoken of this before — said that the railways
should not be built because the human nervous system would
not be able to cope with them. This is on historical record;
it happened in 1838. Not so long ago, therefore, the
professional opinion was that railways should not be built.
If, however, people were to build railways after all —
so the document says — high board fences should be put
on either side of the tracks, so that the farmers would not
see the trains passing by and suffer concussion as a result.
Yes, it is easy to laugh afterwards, when reality has ignored
such arguments. People laugh about it afterwards, but there
are some elemental spirits who laugh about human folly when
it is being committed, or indeed even before scientists come
up with such foolish notions.

We must break
with anything where the opposite has proved true. Reality is
contradicting theory, and the life of the last three years,
as it has been all over the world, is contradiction come to
realization. We must take a new look at events, for the
present time is challenging us to make a radical revision of
our views. It is actually difficult to take such a train of
thought through to its conclusion once it has been started.
Humanity is not sufficiently free-thinking today to allow
these thoughts to reach their conclusion. Anyone who has a
sense for reality, for what really happens all around us, can
of course see that the conclusions are being drawn in the
real world outside. It is just that people will not get this
into their heads.

There is an
enormous difference in this respect between the West and the
East. Last year I discussed the profound difference between
West and East with you from all kinds of different points of view,
[ Note 7 ]
pointing out, for
example, that the West is mainly talking of birth and of
claiming rights. Look at Western views: birth and origin is
the principal idea in science. It has given rise to Darwin's
theory on the origin of species. We might also say: in
ideological terms the theory of birth and origin, in
practical terms the idea of human rights.

In the East,
in Russian life, which is little known to us, we find
reflections on death, on the human goal extending into the
world of the Spirit, and on the concept of guilt and of sin
in terms of practical ethics — read Soloviev,
[ Note 8 ]
his works are now readily
available. Such contrasts may be found in most areas, and we
do not grasp reality unless we take full note of them.
Emotions, sympathies and antipathies prevent people from
considering the things which matter. As soon as sympathies
and antipathies are aroused, people will not even let the
truth get near them; in the same way people who have fallen
in love with a particular analogy fail to see the
contradictions. People hold anything they love for the
absolute truth; they cannot even imagine that the opposite
may also be true, though from a different point of view.

Let us
consider the West, and specifically the Anglo-American West,
for the rest are mostly repeating what they are saying. Which
point of view — or ideal, as people also like to call
it — is all-pervading, particularly in Wilsonianism? It
is that the whole world should be the same as these Western
nations have been in recent centuries. They developed their
own ideal system — calling it by different names, such
as ‘democracy’ and the like — and other
nations are very much at fault because they have not
developed the same system! It is only right and proper that
the whole world should adopt their system. The Anglo-American
view is this: ‘What we have developed, what we have
become, is right for all nations, great and small; it creates
the right political situation and makes the people happy.
This is how things should be everywhere.’

We hear it
being proclaimed; it is the gospel of the West. No one even
considers that such things are only relative and that they
develop mainly on the basis of emotions and not, as people
believe, of pure sense and reason.

Take care, of
course, not to squeeze these words too much, for squeezing
the last out of a word is something which often leads to
misunderstanding today. People might think, for instance,
that I want to hit out at the American people, or the
Anglo-American peoples, when I speak of Wilsonianism or
Lloyd-Georgianism. This is not at all the case. I am
deliberately calling it ‘Wilsonianism’ because I
mean something quite specific. But far be it from me to mean
something which you could simply call
‘Americanism’. This is another case where one has
to concentrate on the real situation. Some of the tirades to
have come from Mr Wilson
[ Note 9 ]
in recent times did not even originate on American soil. We
cannot even do Mr Wilson the honour of calling his tirades
original. They are worthless and untrue and they are not even
entirely original. The strange thing is that a writer in
Berlin, someone with considerable acumen, has written
articles which were Wilsonian without being Wilson's. They
did rather well, these articles, though not in Germany. They
did well in the American Congress and you find them included,
page by page, in the
Proceedings of Congress,
because they were read out at Congress meetings. Some of
Wilson's more recent tirades may be found in those pages.
Some of the fabrications Wilson produces against Central
Europe have their origin there. So they are not even
original. It should be rather interesting, quite a joke in
fact, when future historians look at the
Proceedings of the American Congress
and find there was a time when those
gentlemen decided not to present their own brilliant ideas
but to read out the articles by the writer in Berlin, and
those pages were then included in their
Proceedings,
with ‘Proceedings of the American Congress’
written on the cover.

What really
interests us, however, is the reason why the Americans liked
those articles. Well, it is because they really say that one
can feel perfectly comfortable on a chair which one has
occupied for centuries and where one is now able to sit and
tell the world: ‘You should all sit on chairs like
this, and everything will be fine.’ This is what you
get in the West.

The East,
Russia, has also come to a conclusion, but not by way of a
concept; the people there are not yet theorists, for they
have their reality. The conclusion they have drawn is a
different one. They never dreamt of saying: ‘What we
have been doing for centuries must now be the salvation of
the whole world. We want people to be the same as we have
been.’ It would have been possible to find a pretty
word for what has been going on for centuries in Russia.
Pretty words can always be found, even if the reality is
about as horrible as you can imagine. If you pay for it with
American money, it will just cost so and so many dollars and
you can reinterpret the most golden of ideas as ethical
ideals. This, however, is not what happened in the East, for
there a real conclusion was reached. People did not say:
‘The world should now accept what we have had so
far.’ Instead, the real conclusion which I touched on
earlier was drawn: that the premises do not have to be
correct. Something has been set in motion, though it is as
yet far from what it will be one day. But this does not
concern us; I do not want to express an opinion on the one or
the other, I merely want to show how great the contrast is.
If you consider the contrast, you get a colossal picture of
the reality between the West, where people swear on anything
which has to do with their past, and the East, where people
have broken with everything that was their past.

If you
consider this, you are not at all far away from the real
causes of the present conflict; neither will you be far away
from something else to which I have drawn attention before:
[ Note 10 ]
The war is actually a war between West and East. The middle is
simply being ground to dust between the two, merely because West
and East cannot come to terms; the middle is suffering because
of disagreement between West and East.

But does
anyone want to pay heed to such a colossal truth? Did the
events of March 1917
[ Note 11 ]
cast a light on the enormous contrast between West and East?
Last year we had the ideologies of the West and the East
written up on this blackboard.
[ Note 12 ]
World history has been teaching
us from March this year. And humanity will have to learn, and
come to understand; if they do not, quite different, even
harder, times will come. It is not a question of knowing
things in an abstract sense but above all of calling for a
changing of ways, for an effort to be made; the old easy ways
must go, and a spiritual approach must be seen to be the
right way. And the effort must be made to find energies
through spiritual science, not the kind of mere satisfaction
where people say: Wasn't that nice! I feel really
good!’ — and float around in Cloud-cuckoo-land
where they gradually go to sleep in their satisfaction at the
harmony which exists in the world and the love of humanity
which is so widespread. This was very much to the fore in the
society endeavour headed by Mrs Besant.
[ Note 13 ]
Many of you will remember the
many protests I made against the precious sweetness and light
that was particularly to be found in the Theosophical
Society. High ideals were dished up liberally and
internationally in the sweetest tones. All you heard was
‘general brotherhood’, ‘love of
humanity’. I could not go along with this. We were
seeking real, concrete knowledge about what went on in the
world. You will remember the analogy I have often used, that
this sweetness and general love seemed to me like someone who
keeps on encouraging the stove which is supposed to heat the
room: ‘Dear stove, it is your general stove duty to get
the room warm; so please make it warm.’ All the male
and female aunts, it seemed to me, were presenting the sum
total of theosophy in those days in sweet words of love for
humanity. My answer at the time was: ‘You have to put
coal in the stove, and put in wood and light the fire.’
And if you are involved in a spiritual movement you must
bring in real, concrete ideas; otherwise you will go on year
after year with sweet nothings about general love of
humanity. This ‘general love of humanity’ has
really shown itself in a very pretty light in Mrs Besant, the
leading figure in the theosophical movement.

It is, of
course, more of an effort to deal with reality than to waffle
in general terms about world harmony, about the individual
soul being in harmony with the world, about harmony in the
general love of humanity.

Anthroposophy
does not exist to send people off to sleep, but to make them
really wide awake. We are living at a time when it is
necessary for people to wake up.